Good basic article on why you need to learn your tools and study your subjects. I recently took a community centre course on drawing/cartooning/painting/etc and relearned a lot of stuff. Teacher was a professional cartoonist for awhile so it was fun to learn the significance of proportions that way! I actually managed to draw recognizable faces for the first time. So, like Glen said - take an art class! Just make sure there’s a good teacher (not just an artist) and its at the right level and topics for you (ask!).
Re: pencil first - absolutely. Even if its purely block diagrams to get started, the pencil is the fastest way for me to actually plan a picture than with using a computer - I’ve finally figured that out after twenty years. Experiments are different ![:wink: :wink:](https://blenderartists.org/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=12)
By the way, I gotta point out one thing to reconsider in there.
Shadows in nature are usually the complement color of whatever the light source is. In other words, shadows are not black.
I don’t draw what is physically correct, I draw what I want to see.
With 3D software, the shadows are physically correct. Sometimes this is not desirable to make a scene fun to look at.
I think this needs to be slightly corrected.
Artists are usually taught to use the light source’s complementary colour for the shadow colour. You also basically said that the 3D software is physically correct, but not always artistically correct. So why does the software not render complementary colours then?
In answer to the teacher’s question: “what colour are shadows?”. Someone said black. Then someone said complementary.
His answer - neither. Shadows are actually… darker shades of the object’s colour lying within the shadow. Shadows are just absence of light. A red object in shadow will be a dark red object. Physically speaking (as shown by 3d software) there will be only object colours of Light-Colour + Object-Colour. Now, if there are other coloured objects nearby (just about always), then reflected light will add an object-coloured light upon it (if you use “radiance” calculations).
An aesthetically-pleasing composition however, will have a balanced colour scheme. Complementary colours are an excellent way to achieve that economically. You may even have a given object sitting on or near an object which happens to be complementary in colour, for a strong contrast. In which case the reflected light will be actually be complementary ![:wink: :wink:](https://blenderartists.org/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=12)
Colour spaces are a whole 'nuther subject, which I don’t even pretend to get anywhere with.